Series 5 ~ Class 5 ~ Positive Self-Portraits

This week we played with creating positive self-portraits on the backgrounds we made over the last two classes.

Why create a positive self-portrait? Most of us have goals we’d like to achieve, but never stop to consider how much the way we see ourselves and the challenges we face can influence our outcomes.

Feeling positive about ourselves and our abilities can actually greatly improve our chances of succeeding at new skills. Positive people are more likely to find see a way through a problem rather than just seeing the problem itself.

Think back to a time in your life when you tried something new. Were you full of doubt or brimming with enthusiasm? The answer may lie in how you felt about being able to proceed with confidence, and confidence usually comes from experience. If you haven’t had the experience you think you need to tackle your current goal, you may need to borrow confidence from your past successes, even if they’re in a different field of endeavour.

Our minds are built to learn from our past experiences. Since most of us have failed at something, we sometimes let our memories of times we didn’t succeed get in the way of succeeding in the future. We weigh the risk of succeeding at something new against the safety of our current comfort zone.
One way around the mind’s tendency to imagine the worst is to remind ourselves of times when we’ve done really well. In effect, we become our own cheerleaders.

One way to do that is to create a visual representation of ourselves as a person who possesses plenty of positive qualities we can use as tools to propel us forward into new challenges and skills.

So our focus this week is on creating a positive self-portrait. We’ll start by creating a colourful (and possibly unusual) collage portrait of ourselves. Unusual because it doesn’t need to look like you look on the outside ~ it’ll be a portrait of a Positive You. On page 3 of the handouts below, you’ll find a writing exercise to help you get in touch with WHEN you’ve felt positive in the past. Then we’ll marry those two things together so you can envision what it feels like to be surrounded by your own positive experience of past successes.

Below is an example of a positive self-portrait I created. You’ll see right away that it looks nothing like me, but there’s a kind of quirky, calm confidence about the portrait which I think totally looks like the “inner me” I’d like to bring with me the next time I’m attempting something new or outside my comfort zone.

Confidence is a beautiful thing, and the more we gain by doing new things, the more we’ll have for future opportunities we haven’t even dreamed of yet. I’m confident we’ll not only dream of them, but we’ll succeed at them as well.

 In the next post, I'll show you two backgrounds I created, plus have some *free* backgrounds you can print out and use if you don't have the time or materials to create your own. I'll also show you my final positive self-portrait, which turned our very colourful indeed!